


After the Storm

by Raufnir



Series: Gladnis 100 Prompt Drabbles [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Blind Ignis, Confessions, Episode Ignis, Gladnis100, Grief, M/M, Tumblr Prompt, let gladio grieve, newly injured ignis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 14:55:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13503888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raufnir/pseuds/Raufnir
Summary: Prompt from the Gladnis100 list on Tumblr.After Altissia. Based on the Episode Ignis credits scene (canonical ending). Scenario: Gladio talks to Ignis’ unconscious form after Prompto leaves the room. He doesn’t realize Ignis can hear him. What does he say?





	After the Storm

The room was dim, the musty air still and silent as a crypt.

Gladio shuddered, letting out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding since Prompto had bolted for the door on Gladio’s instruction. He grabbed a fistful of his hair and tugged it just to try and relieve some of the rapidly-distilling terror inside him. He couldn’t even feel the pull.

The figure lying on the bed might as well have been a marble effigy. His chest hardly moved. Gladio couldn’t shake the way Igins’ body had felt so _heavy_ in his arms. He’d carried him only once before, when Ignis had sprained an ankle in training, but that had been different. Ignis had clung awkwardly to his shoulders then, somehow easing the load on Gladio’s arms, but now, here, after finding him on that storm-soaked quayside, having carried him through the ruins of Altissia, Gladio feared for his life.

He seemed to be hanging by a thread. It was hard to breathe just looking at him.

The silvery scars that gouged into Ignis’ beauty, somehow not detracting from it, were freshly sealed, but Gladio couldn’t begin to imagine how he’d come by them. He’d never seen burns like those, if they were even burns at all.

“Ignis,” he choked. Tears swam before his eyes. Never once in all the times they’d confronted death so far had he been this afraid. “Gods, Ignis…” he sobbed.

He let his body fall uselessly into a chair beside Ignis’ bed, fingers snatching up the cold, seemingly lifeless hand that lay over the covers. “Please, don’t you dare die on me,” he begged, voice breaking. “Please. I can’t do any of this without you. It’s selfish, as always. But I need you.” He squeezed Ignis’ hand. “Noct needs you too, but, Astrals, Ignis, I need you.”

The sounds of the city outside barely filtered through the open window to reach his ears. Buildings toppled and crumbled like sandcastles into the tide, the waters of the harbour seethed and roiled still, the last ripples of the Hydrian’s wrath sweeping across the once-peaceful bay, and here at the centre of it all, Ignis lay still as death.

Those scars. A chill ran along Gladio’s nerves, his skin prickling into goosebumps. There was one on Ignis’ left hand, a tight band around his middle finger, that had made Gladio’s stomach churn queasy to look at. He was deliberately sitting on Ignis’ right side now.

The burn on his finger might have been out of sight, but still, the memory of it tormented Gladio. “Ignis, tell me you didn’t…?” he whispered. “Please. Gods, tell me you didn’t make a bargain with them…”

Tears splashed down onto Ignis’ right hand as Gladio squeezed his eyes shut.

“Gods, Ignis… _I’m_ his damned shield. _I’m_ supposed to make sacrifices for him, not you. That’s why I went to Gilgamesh… And anyway, you’ve already given your life to Noctis a thousand times over.” He sniffed disconsolately. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. _I_ was… Iggy… It was supposed to be me… Never _you_ … _Never_ –” he was unable to finish as grief and exhaustion and the last swirls of adrenaline washed through him.

With a wordless cry, he let his forehead fall to rest on Ignis’ limp hand, the fine bones shifting slightly under its weight.

Gladio cried for the first time in a decade. He’d not cried like that since he and Iris had lost their mother. He’d not _allowed_ himself the luxury of grieving for his father – he’d had to keep the group moving forward; no time for his own loss – but now, caught suspended in a moment of agonising loss, like a spider’s prey in silken threads, he couldn’t hold any of it back any longer.

“When we lost coms,” he rasped a while later, “I… I was so scared, Iggy. I…” He sniffed, not looking up at him. “I’ve never been so afraid in my whole life. When that ship came down and the bridge just… vanished, and then you weren’t there and we couldn’t see you in the rubble… Gods… I thought you were dead…”

His whole body shook as he recalled barely having time to yell, “Look out!”, and how in that moment, defined by Prompto’s scream as though by a flash of lighting, and the sudden, wrenching loss of Ignis’ presence, Gladio had thought he’d lost his best friend forever. 

“But then we heard your voice…” He cradled that cold, familiar hand again, voice softening, deepening, “And it was like the Astrals had heard my prayers…”

His breathing came in ragged, choppy gulps and gasps.

“I thought you were going to be ok, Iggy. I thought… I thought we could make it… you know? If we could all just get to the altar…”

His chest heaved and his hand tightened around those seemingly lifeless fingers.

“But then… then we heard snatches of what was happening on the coms… Ravus’ voice… _Ardyn’s_ voice… I tried… Oh Iggy I tried… but I just couldn’t get to you in time…”

Overwhelmed, he broke off, his voice cracking under the weight of his guilt and grief.

“I love you,” he hissed.

Then his mouth fell open in a silent howl as sobs began to rend his whole body.

Unable to move, to breathe, beneath the excruciating guilt and fear, he cried until his golden eyes burned and his tears stopped coming. Even then, he couldn’t scrape together the courage to look up and see Ignis lying there, immobile and unconscious.

“All my life, you’ve been there,” he whispered, the pad of his thumb circling one of Ignis’ knuckles. “You’ve been the only constant. Everyone else has changed, grown up, or fucking _died_ , but you’ve _always_ been my rock.”

He pressed his lips to the back of Ignis’ hand. The skin was salty with sweat or sea water. “I should clean you,” he murmured. “You always hate being dirty. Maybe I’ll do it when the doc’s been to see you, ok?”

He paused, as though Ignis were in any condition to be answering him, and then sighed.

That was when Gladio looked up properly at him for the first time since laying him down on that bed.

His hair was matted and soggy, and his face a little raw around the strange scars, the skin puckered and puffy beneath the edge of the scarring. His lips were softly parted as though in sleep, and Gladio ached to kiss them. He was afraid they’d be as cold as his hands.

Ignis’ exposed collarbones looked delicate as always, and the skull pendant his uncle had given him on gaining his Crownsguard rank sat to make a mockery of the living flesh beneath: a true _momento mori_. Gladio wanted to rip it off and hurl it into a corner. Skulls and death were not something he wanted to see close to Ignis in that moment.

“I love you so much. You damned, selfless creature…” he murmured fondly, stretching a hand up to lift his ash-brown hair from where it lay over his eyelids. “Always have.” His slim torso was hard with muscle, but his skin was cool, his shirt damp. “I need to deal with you properly,” he snarled. “Where’s that damned doctor?”

Ignis’ chest suddenly gave a single, solitary heave, and Gladio leapt to his feet, leaning over Ignis. “Iggy?”

The advisor’s breathing returned instantly to how it had been before the spasm, shallow but regular, his pulse still too quick for Gladio’s liking.

“Fuck, Iggy,” he hissed. “I _can’t_ do this without you. Don’t you dare die on me.”

Another fifteen minutes passed, with Gladio muttering aloud of all the things he loved about Ignis, from the shape of his face, to the tone of his voice, the way he got cranky when he ran out of caffeine, his sassiness, his empathy, his selflessness, his gods-damned selflessness…

A knock at the door heralded a visit from the doctor, accompanied by a slightly breathless and sweaty Prompto.

“Thanks,” Gladio said. “How’s Noct?”

“Same,” Prompto said, eyes not leaving Ignis as the doctor opened Ignis’ shirt and listened to his heart and lungs through the stethoscope. “Gladdy?” he whispered, a nickname he rarely used. “Gladdy, what are we going to do, if… if they don’t…”

“They will.”

“But –?”

“They will.”

The doctor spent a good while with Ignis, and when he straightened, he wore a grim expression.

“Well?” Gladio barked, all but lunging forward.

The doctor cleared his throat and gave them his best prognosis, adding, “Though I’ve never seen injuries like this. Time will tell, but at least he’s stable for now.”

“Can I move him? I wanna clean him up…”

“Be careful, but yes. There are no broken bones, no internal damage.” At the doorway, the doctor paused. “Call me if there are any changes to either of them.”

Gladio nodded.

“Gladio?” Prompto chimed, still standing near the door.

“Yeah?”

“I’m… I’m gonna go be with Noct, ok? But if you need me… just let me know, ok?”

Gladio nodded, already thinking about how best to sort Ignis out a bit. He didn’t hear Prompto leave as he turned to the phone and rang down to the hotel reception and asked for a large bowl. When it had been brought to him, he ran the hot tap, marvelling that the Leville still somehow had hot water when much of the city was in ruins.

“Small mercies, eh Iggy?” he said conversationally, wringing out the wash cloth and beginning to dab around the scars. “You tell me if any of this hurts, ok?”

Silence.

With trembling fingers, he drew back what remained of Ignis’ favourite purple shirt, and hoisted his body up to shimmy him carefully out of it. Similar silver scars threaded down his muscles and veins on his torso, and now, bare without the shirt to cover it, they looked even more sinister. Perhaps they would fade in time. They already seemed a little less angry than they had before. Perhaps that was just wishful thinking on Gladio’s part.

Gladio washed Ignis chest with all the delicacy someone of his size and strength could muster. Tenderly he drew the cloth around Ignis’ jawline and neck, before towelling him off gently and lifting him upright to do his back. When his torso was clean, Gladio laid him back down on the bed, took the bowl back to the bathroom, tipped it into the empty bath.

He had just begun to rinse it out when he heard a noise from the bedroom.

At the sound of a soft grunt and a moan, his fingers flew open and the bowl clattered into the sink. He bolted back inside to find Ignis starting to sit up, his eyes trying to open, though the lids looked heavy and reluctant.

“Iggy!” he gasped, coming to a skidding halt beside the bed and placing a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Take it easy, ok? Take it easy. Lie back, lie back down.”

“Gl…Gladio?” the advisor stammered groggily, his head turning slightly to reveal more of those angry scars.

“Yeah, I’m here,” he said, clasping Ignis’ right hand and sinking down onto the bed. He jostled Ignis’ long legs a little, but Ignis was too taken up with the effort of sitting and holding Gladio’s hand to mind. His once-clear green irises were marred by a thick film of damage and it was instantly clear that he couldn’t see Gladio’s face, mere inches from his own.

Tears sprang afresh to Gladio’s eyes and he drew Ignis close. His torso was still bare, his toned shoulders and arms stippled with gooseflesh, but somehow Ignis found the strength to hold him in return with his free left hand.

The moment Ignis’ palm came down to rest on the flat of Gladio’s back, Gladio let out a shuddering, choking sob. “Oh Iggy…”

“I know. I know,” Ignis whispered, his lips brushing against Gladio’s skin. “And… I should have said this a very long time ago, but… I love you too.”

 


End file.
